


You've been talking in your sleep

by marysutherland



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Comfort, F/F, Female Character of Color, Femslash, Operas
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-23
Updated: 2014-12-25
Packaged: 2018-03-03 11:18:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2848979
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marysutherland/pseuds/marysutherland
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Anthea's trip to the opera brings some strange effects</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fengirl88](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fengirl88/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Sleeping Beauty](https://archiveofourown.org/works/207796) by [fengirl88](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fengirl88/pseuds/fengirl88). 



> Many thanks to [Kalypso](http://kalypso-v.livejournal.com/) for betaing
> 
> Several months ago, [fengirl](http://fengirl88.livejournal.com/) made some requests for the [Five Acts meme](http://fengirl88.livejournal.com/166812.html). She asked for sleep and bedding themes and her pairings included Anthea/Ella or Anthea/ACD!Irene. Inspired by her [Sleeping Beauty](http://archiveofourown.org/series/68175) sequence, which includes several trips to the opera, this is the result.

It feels strange to Anthea, going to the opera without Ella, but Ella’s in London and she’s in New York, so going together isn’t a realistic option. Besides, Mycroft’s only provided her with one ticket for tonight’s performance and he claims he had to blackmail a Congressman just to get that.

The ticket’s by way of an apology to Anthea. What was supposed to be a quick trip to Virginia to liaise with the CIA turned into three weeks’ undercover work in Pennsylvania. Still, she’s left the Scowrers and the Valley of Fear behind and it’s time to enjoy herself. And how better to do that than with the hottest ticket in town? Tonight, Anthea’s going to hear Renée Adler sing.

Unusual to have a contralto be the current US opera sensation, but Adler’s no ordinary contralto. She’s that rare beast: an old-fashioned _soprano sfogato_ , with a freakishly wide-ranging voice:  a natural in the low register of a contralto and yet can still somehow get up to a soprano C.  A lot of nineteenth-century operas were written for leading ladies like that and there are connoisseurs who don’t mind missing a few bolted-on high Es for a voice with real weight lower down.

It’s not just her voice, though, that Adler has going for her. Anthea’s spent the day reading profiles of the singer and, although they mostly recycle the same limited range of facts, that’s significant in itself. Renée Adler’s been very canny with her career, ever since she made it out of Hoboken, New Jersey. She trained in New York, somehow wangled herself a ticket to Europe and then made a big hit in Warsaw. A triumphal return to the States, but in her late twenties she abruptly cut her workload down to a handful of public appearances; no more interviews, no more recordings. Alongside that, though, were numerous private performances: Russian oligarchs, Saudi princes, but also supposedly several for the Crown Prince of Bohemia.

Anthea recognizes the old marketing trick: make something sufficiently scarce, sufficiently exclusive and the quality becomes secondary. It’s having heard Renée Adler sing when your friends haven’t that counts. And exclusivity is probably the reason for tonight’s unusual role: Amina in Bellini’s _La sonnambula._

Anthea doesn’t know the work at all, and when she checks on it online she understands why. Beautiful music, but an achingly stupid plot even for opera, all about a sleepwalking peasant girl who wanders into a count’s bedroom on the eve of her wedding and is compromised.  Sleepwalking was apparently a fashionable subject for plays in 1827, which just confirms the advantage of living in the twenty-first century. Shame she couldn’t have seen Renée Adler in a breeches role; from the photos, she looks good as a boy. Anthea will go along to _La sonnambula_ , but it’ll be for Adler’s voice only.

***

By the end of the first act, though, she’s changed her mind. The whole cast’s singing is ravishingly lush and, as usual at the Met, the director’s been conservative with the production. This isn’t sleepwalking in space and there are no Nazis: it’s set firmly in early nineteenth-century Switzerland, or at least an Italian dream of it. The mill that Amina’s foster-mother Teresa owns is there in the background, looking to be in full working order, and Anthea half-wonders if they’re going to bring a cow on stage at some point.

The stagecraft may be impressive, but the plot still shouldn’t be convincing. Yet it almost is, mostly due to Adler’s acting. Amina, the innocent peasant girl who brings nothing to her wedding but her heart, sounds too sickly sweet to be true, but the trust Adler puts into Amina’s eyes when she gazes at her fiancé Elvino is breathtaking.

And yet somehow, in the sleepwalking scene, Adler’s eyes go blank and you know that she’s not there anymore, that the spirit is no longer inside that beautiful body. A woman who’s singing an aria can’t possibly be asleep, but you can almost believe she is. Amina’s calling for Elvino as she sleepwalks into a bedroom in the inn. The long lost heir to the nearby castle is staying there, but Count Rodolfo doesn’t take advantage of the sleeping girl. It’s no wonder he ends up jumping out of the window to avoid being caught with her. There’s something uncanny about Adler’s Amina in that scene; her unconscious purity almost a threat. If you touched her, would it really be a surprise if your hand were cut to ribbons or shrivelled up?

And then that purity is abruptly challenged. The villagers find Amina asleep on Rodolfo’s chaise-longue and when she wakes up Elvino denounces her as faithless, despite her protests of innocence.

*** 

The story shouldn’t move her, Anthea thinks as she sips her Bellini at the interval. It’s ridiculously primitive. Amina should have dumped Elvino at the moment in the first scene when he sang about being jealous of the breezes in her hair. And how can you take seriously a world where a woman makes one false move and she risks everything, her whole life, perhaps?  
Except it’s all too easy for Anthea to believe in a story like that at the moment. After all, she’s just spent three weeks undercover in the Valley of Fear.

***

“We need someone to go up to Vermissa Valley Township in Pennsylvania,” the CIA agent tells Anthea when they meet at Langley. “They call it the Valley of Fear.”

“There’s a definite connection to the men we’re interested in?” she asks, because she hasn’t been sent here just to help out the Americans. It’s supposed to be a trade.

“It’s the main base for the Scowrers, a white supremacist militia. They have strong ties to the neo-Nazi groups in Europe that you’re after. If we could bring some of the Scowrers in, I reckon we could unravel a lot of the wider networks.”

“Why’s it called ‘The Valley of Fear’?” Anthea asks, and wonders whether she should have asked that question first.

“Because the Scowrers rule it. It’s weird country up there,” the agent replies, with the earnestness of a young man who’s always lived in upmarket suburbs. “Used to be a big mining area in the nineteenth century, but then the industry collapsed. Now there’s nothing but pollution and poverty. The rivers run orange from the abandoned mines, and anyone with any sense leaves town.”

“Except for the supremacists.”

“They pretty much run the valley, and the drug trade for miles around. Only a local problem for years, but then a guy called Jack McGinty came along with bigger plans. Murders and beatings all over the county; the Scowrers muscled in on every racket going. They even beat up a local journalist. That was when a militia member called Morris got cold feet and went to the FBI. They recruited him as an informant, but lately he’s been too scared to talk to them. Doesn’t even dare leave the valley to meet his handler anymore.”

“Really?” she asks. It’s starting to sound like the Wild West has come east.

“Thing is, there’s only one road out of the valley through the hills, so it’s easy to tail someone. Or to run them off the road, if you don’t care for who they’re seeing. The Feds want Morris to turn state’s evidence, but if they go into Vermissa to try and pick him up, they’re worried they could trigger a second Waco. They ended up coming to us, asking for some advice.”

“You want to do it as quietly as possible,” Anthea says. “Particularly since the Agency’s not supposed to get involved in domestic operations. So what are you hoping we might do?”

“We need a harmless-looking outsider researching their family history. Just about the only reason someone from out of state would go to the Vermissa Valley. Morris runs a clothing store that’s been there for generations. Easy enough to get talking about local history and then take things from there.”

“What if Morris needs to relocate?”

“Bring him to Wilkes-Barre and the Bureau can handle things from then.”

Anthea knows the answer to the next question before she asks. “How soon do you need someone to go in?”

“It’s why we got you over the moment we heard MI5 might be interested. We’re run ragged with Syria, not a field agent to spare. But I’d say Morris has been living on borrowed time for at least six months.”

***

“Your name’s Ettie Edwards, and you’re from Chicago,” her handler tells Anthea, as she starts prepping for the operation. “Mother’s English, hence the accent, father’s ancestry is German. You’ll need to go blonde, by the way.”

“Edwards doesn’t sound very German,” Anthea comments.

“You’re married,” the handler replies. She’s a shrewd middle-aged woman called Sarah Rubin. “Your husband’s back in Chicago for the summer, but you’ve got a yen to trace your roots. You’re on the trail of an ancestor called Jacob Shafter. We know a man of that name lived in the Vermissa Valley back in the 1870s.”

“Do I need to be married?”

“You’re wearing a wedding ring, aren’t you?” Sarah says. Her own plump hands have no jewellery on them.

“Yes.” Anthea’s worn it for the last couple of months. “But I can take it off during the operation.”

Sarah shakes her head. “Best not to. Often there’s still a mark underneath. Someone might spot it, start asking questions. Besides, a married woman in the Vermissa Valley will get less hassle than a single one, let alone a divorcee.”

A white woman married to a white husband, maybe. Not a white woman recently married to a black woman, like Anthea is in real life. Good job that she’s used to pretending.

“Tell me more about my husband,” she says.

Sarah smiles. “His Christian name’s Boyd, but he’s always known as ‘Birdy’.”

***

It’s straightforward enough, in the end. Morris is elderly, a kind old man who can show an avuncular interest in Mrs Edwards’ researches without arousing suspicion. And shrewd enough to have collected a lot of hard data about the Scowrers over the last eighteen months. Anthea wonders how he got involved with them in the first place, but she mustn’t ask questions like that. Her job is to get all Morris’ information onto her laptop and then get the data and Morris safely out of harm’s way.

That bit’s easier said than done. She’s staying at the only motel in town, which is owned by Jack McGinty, and Anthea’s pretty sure most of the other businesses in the immediate area are under his thumb as well. And as the local highway commissioner, he can use roadworks as an excuse to seal off the valley whenever he needs to. Anthea might possibly be able to hike out on foot, but Morris certainly wouldn’t be up to that.

She’s being watched, as well, and it’s not just the usual interest in a pretty blonde stranger coming into a small town. The questions she gets asked in the motel bar by the local drinkers aren’t preludes to an attempted pick-up, but pumping her to see what she knows. Checking that she is just an innocent with a fascination for genealogy. She has to be sure to look convincing, not break character even when she thinks she’s alone. No reports to Mycroft; no calls home to Ella, even if she could get a decent cellphone signal. Just cheery, meaningless chats on the motel’s payphone to ‘Birdy’ in Chicago.

It takes a week to secure all the data, and nearly a fortnight more to work out a way to make an exit. Anthea’s running out of local history to investigate. Time to force the pace, maybe. On her next call to her husband, Anthea asks ‘Birdy’ to let ‘Cousin Sally’ know she’s in the area. Sure enough, two days later Morris comes into the motel bar asking to speak to Jack McGinty urgently. Morris is to tell him that he’s heard rumours from a friend in Old Bridge about a Pinkerton operative coming to the valley, show him the warning letter he’s been sent. Anthea has to hope McGinty won’t over-react, but she’s the obvious person to suspect.

It works better than she could have hoped. Within twenty-four hours, her motel room has been broken into and her laptop stolen. McGinty blames it on “fucking Latrino thieves,” and insists they’re “not from round here”, but it’s easy enough for Anthea to pretend that she doesn’t feel safe in Vermissa Valley anymore, and to ask her new friend Morris to accompany her to Wilkes-Barre airport. She isn’t exactly surprised, however, when the local police stop her as she’s on the highway out of the valley, saying there have been reports of theft, and asking to search her rental car.

Morris is sweating, but Anthea has the flash-drive safe in the heel of one boot and the officers don’t think to look there. She’s wiped her laptop hard drive carefully, so all McGinty’s men will find will be her genealogy notes and a few faked pictures of ‘Birdy’. And as long as she stays polite and submissive, the cops know better than to harass a white woman around Vermissa Valley. They let her go with apologies, and she smiles graciously at them.

There’s a federal agent at the airport ready to fly to O’Hare with Morris, so Anthea’s job is over. She retrieves her own passport and Blackberry and gets a plane for Newark. After that it’s on to New York and civilization...

***  
What would Vermissa Valley have been like back in 1827, Anthea finds herself wondering, as she waits for the second act curtain to rise. Before they dug out the hills for anthracite, would it have been a leafy paradise, like the state parks nearby? Good land, perhaps, but fights over it from the start: the Six Nations, the Dutch, the Pennamites all wanting it.

And when the mines got going, did some of Bellini’s Swiss villagers end up there? A lot of Northern Italians certainly emigrated to the Coal Region, judging by the records she saw. Peasant life clearly wasn’t as much fun as Bellini made it look.

Time to forget about the Valley of Fear, and all the deaths and disasters it’s seen, as the orchestra tunes up again. Tonight, there’s no need to worry. This is opera _semiseria_ , after all, so everything’s going to end happily.

***  
As expected, everyone spends most of Act 2 telling Elvino that Amina’s innocent and he flatly refuses to believe them, despite Rodolfo spending an entire aria explaining the theory of sleepwalking. Instead, Elvino’s going to marry his previous fiancée, Lisa, though she’s now clearly eyeing up the Count as a late alternative. Amina’s foster-mother Teresa is about to denounce Lisa, Rodolfo’s still trying to insist Amina is innocent and then the climax comes. Amina appears, asleep again, walking across a dangerously narrow and decrepit mill bridge that Teresa obviously hasn’t bothered to repair.

Rodolfo warns everyone to shut up or she’ll wake and fall, which somehow manages to sound poetic in Italian. Everyone on stage holds their breath – or at least sings under it – as Amina walks along the bridge above the moving mill wheel. A plank gives beneath her feet with a crack, and as the chorus shriek softly, Anthea almost lets out a squeak herself. No guard-rail and Renée Adler’s unseeing eyes can’t look where she’s going. Miss her step and it’s a ten-foot drop at least. There must be some trick to it, but it’s a brilliantly staged trick.

But then Adler’s across the bridge, safely back on the main stage and as the audience breathe again, Amina starts to sing. She is innocent but her wedding ring is lost. The flowers she wears have already withered. And at last that bastard Elvino has realised his mistake, is crying. The audience applaud the aria, but Amina doesn’t hear. All the sleepwalking girl wants is Elvino. She calls on him despairingly to turn to her and he reaches out, places the wedding ring on her finger and then collapses at her feet. As the chorus’ songs of joy surge up, Amina wakes at last, bewildered.

“Tu non dormi,” Elvino sings, “Il tuo sposo, il tuo amante è a te vicino.” _You’re not asleep. Your husband, your lover is near you_. Amina rejoices in her final aria and Anthea’s swept up in that joy, of the closing promise of a heaven of love. As she leaves the opera house she knows her heart’s still beating a little faster, she’s standing a little taller. Because that’s how it can feel, can’t it, whoever you are? She suddenly remembers a verse from Betjeman:

_"Let us not speak, for the love we bear one another—_  
Let us hold hands and look."  
She such a very ordinary little woman;  
He such a thumping crook;  
But both, for a moment, little lower than the angels  
In the teashop's ingle-nook. 

Amina may be ordinary and Elvino crooked of heart, but Renée Adler isn’t either. She’s taken a ridiculous opera and made it _live_ and how many others singers could do that?

***  
Tempting to phone Ella when she gets back to her hotel room, but it’s the middle of the night in the UK, so it’d be very anti-social. And besides, Anthea can’t yet work out how to put tonight into words, explain Adler’s magic. Her own thoughts are still scrambled. She’ll have a shower and go to bed. Phone Ella tomorrow at breakfast time, like she did today, which will be lunch-time for Ella.

In the shower, her weary mind keeps on nagging at her: there’s someone else she has to phone. But that doesn’t make sense. She’s done with the CIA for now, she’s phoned Ella and Mycroft today, and none of her East Coast friends know she’s around. So who else can it be? And then she finally remembers. For the last three weeks, most nights she’s been phoning her supposed husband, and her mind still hasn’t entirely caught up with her changing identities. Though there’s no such man as Birdy Edwards, and she wouldn’t want him as her husband if there were. And suddenly she can’t resist the ridiculous joke. Leaning back in the shower she starts to sing in a voice that would appal Renée Adler:

“I’m gonna wash that man right out of my hair,  
I’m gonna wash that man right out of my hair,  
I’m gonna wash that man right out of my hair,  
And send him on his way.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The opera's over, but that's not the last of Renée Adler

Anthea wakes in the middle of the night, because there’s someone in her room, standing right next to the bed. She’s sure of it. As one hand rests on the light switch, the other reaches for her gun. Birdy Edwards may not be real, but the Scowrers are.

But when she flicks on the light, it’s not a man staring down at her, but Amina. No, not Amina, even though she’s still wearing Amina’s demure check dirndl. It’s Renée Adler’s clever eyes that are scanning Anthea’s face. The Scowrers wouldn’t use a woman for anything important; that’s not why she’s here.

“How did you get in, Renée?” Anthea demands, and Renée gives her a cheerful smile that has none of Amina’s simple sweetness.

“Call me Irene, all my friends do,” she replies, in her low, rich voice. “Maybe I’m sleepwalking again.”

“The door’s locked,” Anthea says firmly, and now she _remembers_. As always, she used a doorstop and the deadbolt as well last night, and she’s on the eleventh floor. Unless Irene can fly, she can’t have got in.

“This is a dream, isn’t it?” she says and Irene’s smile doesn’t waver.

“Of course, but the question is, whose?”

“It must be mine,” Anthea says. “You’re just a figment of my imagination.”

“Then what do you want?” Irene’s smile is suddenly demure. “If it’s your dream, it’s your choice. Ask me anything.”

Strange how she knows that what Anthea always wants first is information.

“Why does Amina do it?” Anthea asks.

“Do what?”

“Sleepwalk.”

“I don’t know.” Irene’s voice is matter-of-fact.

“But you’re playing the character.”

“Amina doesn’t know why she sleepwalks. She’s doesn’t properly understand what’s happening to her. So I don’t know – can’t know – the reason.”  Irene’s face is serious now, the master craftsman assessing her own work. “It’s better that I don’t know: don’t try and turn it into subconscious trauma or rejection of Elvino or something like that.” She smiles again. “Too many operas spoiled by half-baked bits of Freud as it is. You should know that.”

“But you know why she stays with Elvino?” It’s not every day you get to hear the insider’s view.

“Because it’s her village and it’s all she knows. She’s scared to leave the valley; even the castle’s too far away to seem truly real. And in the village there’s Elvino or the smelly goatherd or the boy from next-door with pimples. Elvino’s the best of a bad lot.”

“I thought Amina adored him?”

“She believes in love. If she loves Elvino enough, he’ll become what he should be. Love is the true mystery, not sleepwalking.” Irene’s smile is mocking now. “At least I presume that’s what Bellini thought.”

Anthea doesn’t know how to reply, and she finds herself blurting out instead: “How did you walk across the mill bridge without looking down?”

“Nylon cord at the back of the bridge, as a guideline. My hand on that keeps me walking straight, but the cord’s practically invisible. A safety harness under the dress, attached via a cord up my sleeve and a karabiner to the guide-cord. If I did ever slip off the bridge, I’d just dangle in mid-air.”

Anthea can almost see it. “You’d look ridiculous.”

“It’s opera. Everyone looks ridiculous at some point.”

“I don’t want you looking–” Anthea says and breaks off, because Irene is reaching out and pulling the duvet away. Then she sits down at the end of the bed, smiling at Anthea, who’s lying curled up in her grey satin pyjamas. Anthea finally gets a close-up look at her for the first time. Irene has a voluptuous figure, obviously – you don’t get a voice that powerful without a substantial chest – but she doesn’t remember Amina’s dirndl being cut quite _that_ low.

“So now I’m here, would you like a private performance?” Irene purrs and for a moment Anthea’s tempted to ask what’s on offer. Till she remembers the Crown Prince of Bohemia.

“Not interested,” she drawls, and the other woman smiles understandingly.

“Godfrey wouldn’t like it anyhow,” she says, tucking her elegant legs under her.

“Godfrey?”

“My husband, Godfrey Norton.”

“I didn’t know you were married,” Anthea says, thinking back to the newspaper articles.

Incongruously, Irene pulls a mobile from a pocket of her dirndl and swipes it a couple of times.

“This is Godfrey,” she says, showing Anthea a photo of a remarkably handsome African-American man with a pencil moustache.

“One in the eye for the Scowrers,” Anthea replies promptly and Irene nods.

“We met in high school,” she says, “and I always knew he was the one. We got married when we were nineteen.”

There’s a tenderness in her voice that Anthea’s heard in some of her arias tonight. When Irene’s looking adoringly at the tenor playing Elvino, is she thinking of Godfrey?

“I was willing to give up my music,” Irene goes on, “but Godfrey said I was made for more than Hoboken. He took two jobs so I could study at Juilliard. Every step of the way, he’s been behind me.”

“But not by your side,” Anthea says, and Irene sighs and shrugs.

“It’s not just the Scowrers,” she says. “All the agents say the same. Audiences prefer their female singers single and old white people are the most likely to oppose interracial marriage.”

_And opera audiences are mostly old and white_ , Anthea thinks, and wonders what they’d have made of Godfrey and Irene Norton in Warsaw.

Irene adds: “That’s what the private performances are for. Get enough in the bank so when I tell people about Godfrey, it doesn’t matter if the engagements dry up. Things won’t be this way forever.”

“It’s hard concealing who you are,” Anthea agrees. “So eventually you’ll tell the Crown Prince where to get off?”

“Godfrey’s prince enough for me,” Irene says, standing up. “I’d better go. We’ve both had long days.” She smiles down. “You wondered what would happen if someone touched the sleeping woman. Time to find out, Anthea.”

_Ice and knives or melting tenderness?_

“Goodnight,” Irene breathes, and a slender hand reaches down and trails gently across Anthea’s mouth.

At Irene’s touch, she wakes up, but there’s no-one in her room.

***  
There’s _definitely_ no-one in her room. Anthea gets up and checks the door; the deadbolt and doorstop are undisturbed. Windows locked, en-suite empty, and even as she opens the wardrobe to check its back isn’t false, she knows that’s not the answer. Not a locked room mystery for Mycroft – or Sherlock – to solve. The right answer is the obvious one. She’s still hyped up in the aftermath of the mission and she dreamt the whole thing.

Hardly a surprise that her own mind came up with possible explanations for aspects of the show and then foisted on them on dream-Irene. The unconscious trying to process experiences: standard psychology. But why did she think that Renée Adler needed a husband? And where specifically did Godfrey Norton come from? Anthea doesn’t believe in premonitions, but Mycroft’s taught her to beware of coincidences. A name doesn’t come from nowhere: it’s a signpost to something. She picks up her phone from the bedside table.

***  
 _A_ Godfrey Norton is easy enough to find. Quoted in one of the early profiles on Renée Adler that Anthea had read this morning. “Godfrey Norton, an old friend of Miss Adler, said: ‘We knew back in tenth grade that Irene would be a star. Once we heard that voice and saw her on stage, we told her she had to go to music school. And we made sure she did it in the end.’”

Nothing there to suggest he was more than a friend to Renée, but also nothing to contradict it. And no picture of him in the article. Still, she has other sources. But as Anthea’s about to check the New Jersey vital statistics website, she stops. Her subconscious has clearly been putting two and two together, but is it to make four or five?

‘Godfrey Norton’ is a very English name, isn’t it? Specifically a WASP one. And Hoboken’s a lot whiter than London is. Is it likely that Renée contracted an interracial marriage straight out of high school, one that lasted? Don’t you need to be a bit older, more mature, to cope with the inevitable prejudice? That’s her own experience, at any rate.

_Her own experience_. She sees the real pattern at last, the fragments of feelings woven into her dream story. The loyal spouse who makes their partner’s glamorous job possible. The loyal black spouse, unknown to others. ‘Godfrey Norton’, whatever he may really be to Renée, isn’t what matters here.

There’s a score for _La sonnambula_ on her desk from yesterday; Anthea goes over and leafs through to the end to read Amina’s final words of joy:

_Ah mi abbraccia, e sempre insieme_   
_Sempre uniti in una speme,_   
_Della terra in cui viviamo_   
_Ci formiamo un ciel d'amor._

A couple of swipes to pull up the right number on her phone and Anthea starts to type, translating as she goes along, because she’s not sure how good Ella’s Italian is:

_Embrace me, and always together, Always united in one hope, From the land in which we live, Let us make a heaven of love_

A few more characters spare in the text, and so she adds: _Miss you, A,_ and presses send. Ella will get that in the morning, smile that slow, warm smile of hers as she reads it. Anthea’s never been one for sentimental gestures. Until Ella came along, that is.

Now it’s time to get herself a drink of water and then go back to bed and try to sleep. She’s got an overnight flight this evening, it’d help to have a decent night’s sleep tonight. Hard to sleep soundly in the Valley of the Fear, but she’s out of that now. And in two nights’ time, she’ll be back in her own bed with Ella, which is a comforting thought.

***

Anthea’s phone rings when she’s in the bathroom, and as she goes to pick it up, for a moment she can’t stop her stomach knotting. Another urgent mission from Mycroft? Who else would be phoning at this time of the night? And then she sees the caller’s number.

“Ella?” she answers, and Ella’s voice, pitched halfway between the professional and personal, asks:

“Are you alright? Can’t you sleep?”

_How could she know?_ And then Anthea finally thinks to look at the time on her phone. 2.46 am, which means it’s 7.46 in London and Ella’s just having breakfast.

“I...woke up early,” she says and doesn’t know how to go on. She can’t think straight and she doesn’t know what to say. But one of the good things about Ella is she’s used to people being incoherent.

“How was the opera?” Ella asks.

“Good. Gorgeous music.” There’s a silence on the line, Ella waiting to see if she has more to say. But she can’t talk about the opera, because the valleys are blurring together in her weary mind, and she can’t talk about Vermissa yet. “I’ll tell you when I get home.”

“I’ll look forward to that,” Ella says smoothly. “Are you still coming on the same flight as you planned, by the way?”

“Yeah. I’m not expecting it to change.” The Valley of Fear is past now, and Anthea can go home.

“Let me know if it does. I want to come to Heathrow to meet you.”

The thought of Ella there at the end of the trip is as comforting as a warm bath, but Anthea has to warn her wife:

“I won’t be able to come straight home...”

“I know,” Ella says. “You’ll have to go down to Millbank first, to be debriefed. But you won’t want to cart your luggage about all morning, will you? I’ll come in the taxi with you and then take it home. And I’ve got the whole morning off, so I can meet you afterwards, if you’d like.”

“You’ve got the morning off?” Ella _never_ has Thursdays off.

“I did a lot of covering for other people at the clinic while you were away, so I’ve been able to work it. One appointment at 2 pm on Thursday which I can’t skip and then I’m free till Monday lunchtime. So when you see Mycroft, tell him you have a lot of time in lieu to take.”

Three, no, four days with Ella, and nothing else to worry about. If Anthea can just get through the next thirty-six hours, when she’s so tired.

“That’s wonderful,” she starts to say, and somehow there’s a massive yawn intruding into her conversation. “Sorry. I really appreciate that.”

“Do you need to go to bed?” Ella asks.

“I did. I woke up because I was having a strange dream,” Anthea says, and knows she sounds like a five-year-old.

“Go and lie down and then you can tell me about it.”

***

“I saw Irene, Renée Adler again...still in her costume...in my room...Renée, not Amina,” Anthea says, and then there’s silence. Except for a few sounds, that might be the phone slipping out of a woman’s hand as she falls asleep, and the tiny hitches of her breathing.

“Anthea?” Ella says in a low voice, but there’s no reply. She waits for a minute or so, because she always waits, but there’s nothing more.

“Goodnight, my darling,” she says, and hangs up. She glances at her watch. She can still get to the clinic on time if she gets a move on. The washing-up will just have to wait till the evening, she thinks, as she shoves the butter back in the fridge and heads for the door.

When Ella had first met Anthea, she’d seemed deeply asleep, just drifting through life. Odd, now, to realise that was just an act, that Anthea’s hidden brilliance means she’s often sent into situations that most women wouldn’t dare face. Undercover in Pennsylvania this time, she’d said, and Ella knows better than to ask questions until it’s all over. Mycroft will get the official debriefing, of course, but it’s Ella who’ll hear the truth about the mission. Not what Anthea learnt, but what it meant to her. Ella will be the one to hold Anthea if she has nightmares, to listen to her when she can’t sleep. Protecting your country isn’t an easy job.

Not what Ella expected from her personal life. She’s counselled veterans for years, and now she’s ended up with someone on active service herself. Probably not her wisest move. But that’s what love is like, isn’t it? Unplanned, unexpected.

Once she’s found a few square inches of space on the train, she pulls out her phone and re-reads Anthea’s text. A quotation, surely; Anthea finds it hard to express emotions in her own words. From the opera, perhaps? Easier to sing about a heaven of love, than to say the words. Love isn’t always heaven. It’s only on stage that you can believe the dream that it is. The happy ending when everyone’s married off and you have the final triumphal chords. Then you have to go out of the theatre, into the real world. Which for most people, most of the time, is less dramatic.

So it’s odd that one of her favourite quotes about marriage should come from an actress. _Marriage is the deep, deep peace of the double-bed after the hurly-burly of the chaise-longue_. Not something she can use with her clients; it’d be too hard to explain the chaise-longue, let alone who Mrs Patrick Campbell was. But she’s met so many people who could do with knowing the substance of the quote. That marriage isn’t just a dream ending, but the beginning of something different, something more important.

Ella never dreamt of marriage, of course, or not once she realised she wouldn’t want the bridegroom around afterwards. And even after civil partnerships came along, and she met Anthea, she never expected an actual wedding, with Anthea and her dancing together afterwards in matching dresses, and a marriage certificate to take home. Not the sort of thing Anthea would want, she always presumed. But she was wrong about that.

She’ll have to tell Anthea that Campbell quote when she’s back, ask her what she reckons to it. Not immediately, though; what with the jetlag and the debriefing, Anthea will want to unwind first. She’ll probably need a few catch-up sleeps as well to recharge. But she’ll be recovering by the weekend, and in the past few weeks Ella’s been dreaming of a lot of things she’d like to do when Anthea’s back. There may be a deep peace to the double-bed, but they can probably still manage a bit of hurly-burly there themselves.


End file.
